Power consumption represents one of the most important design considerations for a wireless device. From the user's perspective, low power consumption desirably increases battery life.
Wireless transceivers employed in modern wireless devices, e.g., cellular telephones, personal data assistants, smart phones, etc., are typically highly integrated, where most of the transceiver functions are integrated on a radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC). A highly integrated RFIC reduces the wireless device's printed circuit board (PCB) area, complexity, and power consumption, while lowering the component cost.
Even when the wireless device uses a highly integrated transceiver RFIC, there is still a desire to reduce the power consumption of the transceiver operations. For example, one of the most power-hungry circuits of a receiver is the receiver front-end, which generally includes a front-end amplifier and mixer. Thus, one way to reduce the overall power consumption of the transceiver is to reduce the power consumption of the receiver front-end.